Thursday, July 19, 2012

Three Quick Fixes For Eve

I'm no CCP Dev, but there are a few quick things that Eve needs to have implemented. There would be almost zero opposition to them. My points aren't complex, but they make sense.

Recently I've been doing a lot of logistics over two accounts. I finally started moving my Carrier about to get some ships across the universe quicker. With that comes both cyno alts and for me, different jump clones. All of these points fall under making life easier for alts and jump clones.

The first thing that needs to be changed is the jumpclone timer. Twenty four hours is just too darn long. If you log on the same time every day, wait a bit, and then jump clone somewhere, you're going to be constantly fighting the jump clone timer as it gets pushed back. The overarching idea with the timer makes sense though. If there were no restriction, you could take off in a fresh clone whenever someone camped you into a station. What about twenty hours though? Or twelve? Either of those timers, or even less, would make the mechanic a lot more useful. It would never put a damper on getting into the action, and it leaves no room for abuse. I missed out on a couple of corp fleets because I was in another jump clone, and that's not a fun part of the game.

The other changes are related to characters on the same account. I realized once I wanted to start jumping the Carrier that I didn't have a dedicated cyno alt I wanted to use. There's no need to muddy up the killboard for a developed character, so I rolled another one as a cyno alt. In doing this there was a lot of flipping skill training and switching between characters. This process is too tedious at the moment. Switching skills involves logging in on one character, logging off, logging back in to the other, and starting the skill. Painful.

Here are the changes. First, let skill training be interrupted by another character on the same account. If Character A tries to start training a skill while Character B is already training, just pop up a window that says "Do you want to pause skill training on Character B?" If you click yes, the skill should start right away. My borderline OCD tendencies had me going off the wall when I had no skill training for a minute or two. Its not a huge deal, but its a pain in the ass and presumably an easy fix.

The last fix is the general switching between characters on accounts. A switch character function would be much appreciated. I tweeted about this in the #tweetfleetbacklog hashtag a while ago and it was one of the most popular RT's according to CCP. Again, its the logging out, logging back in with full-credentials-again deal. Why can't you switch more seamlessly? Most people would have no problem with a session change timer or something similar for switching between characters, but the current format is not useful.

These changes aren't monumental in any way, and its not the first time they've been suggested. But seriously, in ALTs Online, we need better functionality with multiple characters and moving around. None of these are absurd, nor absurdly difficult, but they'd make a world of difference in using multiple characters. End Rant.